Monthly Archives: April 2012

You can leave Hell now.

church, Pascha, quotes, ,

What does The Resurrection mean? So much, so much.

 …you must know what Jesus Christ, the Saviour, has delivered you from. He has delivered you from a Hell whose Reception Room is on this world right now, in this time and generation, and its atmosphere is stinking up the place. Sin is nothing more that getting addicted to Hell and staying in its environment … and when it comes time to pass on, the sin-addicted soul is so used to the darkness that it doesn’t want to leave.
….

“I have thrown open your prison doors.
“Do not remain in this present darkness. Come out into the Light. Come with Me into the Springtime of your soul. Come back into the Eden where you belong.
“Wake up to My light and grace. Breathe the air of true liberty.
“This is the Day I, the Lord, have made for you. Rejoice and be glad in it.”

Read the rest of this short sermon here.
(Thanks to Anastasia)

 

Our Continual Mistake – Quote

quotes, time,

From Father Alexander Elchaninov:

Our continual mistake is that we do not concentrate upon the present day, the actual hour, of our life; we live in the past or in the future; we are continually expecting the coming of some special moment when our life will unfold itself in its full significance. And we do not notice that life is flowing like water through our fingers, sifting like precious grain from a loosely fastened bag.

Constantly, each day, each hour God is sending us people, circumstances, tasks, which should mark the beginning of our renewal; yet we pay them no attention, and thus continually we resist God’s will for us. Indeed, how can God help us? Only by sending us in our daily life certain people, and certain coincidences of circumstance. If we accepted every hour of our life as the hour of God’s will for us, as the decisive, most important, unique hour of our life – what sources of joy, love, strength, as yet hidden from us, would spring from the depths of our soul!

Let us then be serious in our attitude towards each person we meet in our life, towards every opportunity of performing a good deed; be sure that you will then fulfill God’s will for you in these very circumstances, on that very day, in that very hour.

being, being, being

church, love, poetry

The poem below, about being in love, is speaking to me and for me, though of course it’s imperfect for that use, coming from a unique and distinct soul, with his own lonely knowings and loves.

Imperfect, but skilled and helpful, and conveying so much of the humanity that belongs to all of us. Love. God Is Love, and if we do any of this work that is the verb to love it is by His grace. If we feel anything like love coming to us or flowing from us, it is the Holy Spirit, for He fills all things.

The poem might be primarily about romantic love, which is inconstant — not that most of us don’t fail to be steadfast in all our loves. In the second stanza the lover declares his constancy, and in the last admits that his love is “in a moment gone.”

But I can’t help feeling the effusion and mystery of divine Love in it, and am reminded of Christ’s teaching that we ought to first love our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Isn’t all love, whether we are giving or taking, essentially God sharing His Life with us and among us, the Love of the Holy Trinity? He uses people to do it, but after all, we find out that it was The Lord.

IN LOVE FOR LONG

I’ve been in love for long
With what I cannot tell
And will contrive a song
For the intangible
That has no mold or shape,
From which there’s no escape.

It is not even a name,
Yet is all constancy;
Tried or untried, the same,
It cannot part from me;
A breath, yet as still
As the established hill.

It is not any thing,
And yet all being is;
Being, being, being,
Its burden and its bliss.
How can I ever prove
What it is I love?

This happy happy love
Is sieged with crying sorrows,
Crushed beneath and above
Between todays and morrows;
A little paradise
Held in the world’s vice.

And there it is content
And careless as a child,
And in imprisonment
Flourishes sweet and wild;
In wrong, beyond wrong,
All the world’s day long.

This love a moment known
For what I do not know
And in a moment gone
Is like the happy doe
That keeps its perfect laws
Between the tiger’s paws
And vindicates its cause.

~ Edwin Muir

Snails and Schist Story

my garden, nature
with arugula flowers

A few years ago Soldier son gave me a lovely piece of schist, a rock slab that he brought from the mountains for me because he knew I would love it. And I did. It isn’t the sort of stone you can use for a path or a table or anything, because it’s too thin, so I leaned it against the fence for decoration.

All the snails in the area thought I had made that arrangement just for their sakes — the perfect snail house. I think I even posted a photo of it here once before. Oh, yes, here it is, last April.

When I was trimming the honeysuckle this week I thought I would check behind my rock for snails, and this time there was a cute little colony of them. I laid the slab down on the ground so that I could take their picture, which you see here.

I went into the house for my camera, snapped the photo, took the camera back, and got on with my pruning job. Crunch. I had stepped right on to the schist and broken it into many pieces, of which I decidedly did not want to take a picture, because it would be too sad.